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After a 16 year break from Coarse Angling I re-ignited my passion for fishing in 2010. Follow my journey from tackle selection, new methods, old and new venue's. All the blanks and bags captured. Thanks for stopping by...

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One of the first things I noticed has changed is some of the language used in angling... I was used to breaking strain and modern day anglers refer to the lines they use in diameters, which to start with is quite confusing.

So, to help understand each line's true strength here a list showing the most commonly used line diameters and their average relative breaking strains... courtesy of gofishing.com

After the success of Manor Farm Fisheries, Mr Keightly and I headed to a local lake where Mark has had some good Carp success, Crystal Lakes in Fenstanton.
They have three lakes to pick from, the Prize Lake, Lake "A" and Lake "B".
We arrived early in the morning on Saturday 16th October, around 7am and had a walk around Lake's "A" and "B". Mark knew exactly which swim I would want to fish... maybe he should have picked his lottery numbers that day as he got it spot on...
A lovely lilly lined swim face me with plenty of options, either far out or either side of the lillies.
I started feeding two main lines, the edge of the lillies in front of me, about one and a half rod lengths out and another swim straight ahead about three rod lengths out...
We used the trusty bait from the previous day, namely red maggots, hemp, Mark's super secret groundbait, corn and meat.
After balling in about 3 golf balls of the trusted secret ground bait mix…

I took Friday 15th October 2010 off work and headed down to Manor Farm Fisheries, to fish the Becks Lake with very good friend Mark Keightley, aka "matey". I did borrow quite a bit of terminal tackle from Mark including something to sit on... Thanks matey!
We decided to fish a double swim, which was a lot more sociable than being in separate swims, plus we could help each other out in case of big fish... or birdlife... more about this later.

We tackled up and started fishing about 8am. Mr Keightley had brought us some red maggots, all sorts of bollies, hemp, sweetcorn, good old spam and his home made ground bait made from trout pellets and crumb plus other offerings.

I decided to start with a simple insert waggler set-up and Mark set up the first of his Carp rods.

Plumbing the depth, I started with a couple of small golf balls of groundbait in a line about 3 rod lengths out. Hookbait I went for a simple single red maggot, feeding hemp on a "little but often basis&q…